A mother’s return to academics

I had conducted a workshop called ‘Street Haunting’ and led a breathing exercise by the water, which some students later told me was the highlight. Pic/Rosalyn D’Mello

It's the beginning of an eventful week and I feel nervous, elated, anxious, and enthused, all at once. Tomorrow I will not just enter an actual classroom within a university for the first time in two years, I will be teaching. I went to the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano on Monday to pick up my identity card. It read, ‘Academic Staff', and it thrilled me to hold it in my hand.

It was an unusual set of circumstances that led me to this temporary teaching gig. I had ranted to a local feminist curator about the absence of sisterhood groups in South Tyrol and she directed me to one on Facebook, which I joined instantly. My partner and I were scrolling through multiple old posts when he came across a listing about a vacancy at the university. The Faculty of Arts and Design was looking for an English language instructor to lead a seminar course called "Gender Equity and Equality Skills in Working Life Situations". The application process involved prescribing a teaching module for the 18-hour-duration of the course. I was between Venice and Tramin as the deadline approached. I was exhausted on the eve of the application deadline. I'd had my first vaccine and the timing coincided with my PMS, which made me feel incapacitated. I had the worst backache ever and my body felt bulldozed. I had every intention of sleeping and waking up early the next morning to write it out and hit send. But my partner egged me on. He motivated me to sit up the night before and finish the course proposal. In the meantime, he had already filled out all the other logistical details on the website - a tedious process in itself. So I powered through and conceived what I still feel is an exceptionally creative proposal.

The chances of my being selected were slim, because the university was very clear that applicants who had a PhD would be given immediate preference. So after I hit send, I decided to just forget about it. Around July-end, when I was in Sardinia, I received an email saying I had been selected to lead the course. I already knew I was pregnant then, but I felt sure that my having a child by the time the course was scheduled to happen couldn't be held against me, especially considering the seminar was about equality in working life situations. Not only was the department understanding, they let me schedule the course according to my convenience within the Summer semester and to fix the hours. My partner said he would take leave from work to take care of our child while I taught. Which brings us to this Friday and Saturday, my first two days of teaching. I picked two-hour slots because taking public transport to the university to and fro would mean I would be away from my child for at least six hours in total, which meant my breasts would get really heavy. I also invested in a mobile electric pump so we can continue breastfeeding even in my absence. I like that my current schedule extends across the span of this month and the first week of next month. It feels comfortable in terms of pace and it will allow me to get to know the students over a period of time and thus build a relationship.

Even until three years ago I hadn't conceived that being a teacher might be one of my callings. It's the work I seem to enjoy the most. The incredible feedback I receive feels validating of my unorthodox feminist pedagogical methods. I realise I love to improvise. For instance, in Venice, when I conducted the workshop called ‘Street Haunting', I conducted a breathing exercise by the water on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore. It was our first morning together and I wanted the students to anchor themselves in the present moment. I remember guiding them into the process of locating themselves sensorially, urging them to listen to all the slight sounds that were being produced in our immediate vicinity, asking them to imagine what kind of marine mammal they might want to be, if they could choose to transform into one, suggesting to them to pay attention to the tenor of their breaths, and so on. I was told, later, that this one was one of the highlights for many of them. I'm also thinking about the last workshop I conducted, which was meant to be around translation. We were to meet over Zoom. I asked all the participants to bake Goan poie and sent them all the same recipe with instructions about what to pay attention to while following the steps. Instead of ‘teaching', over the Zoom call I invited each one to share their experience so that the instruction emerged through our collective thinking and fantasising. It was a delight.

On Sunday I will travel to Innsbruck and will stay there until the opening of our residency exhibition next Thursday. I will be alone with our child, and I am nervous. Even though I spend most of the day with him, I have drawn comfort from knowing my partner is present in the mornings and evenings and can take over caregiving when I need him to. In some ways Innsbruck is the perfect place to test our rhythm because everything is within walking distance and I can avoid public transport. I am unsure, though, how to be intellectual in public when I am with my child, in those moments when my consciousness will indeed be split between his needs and the demands of being in a collegial set-up.

It's really amazing how one experiences everything familiar differently through the prism of motherhood. I really have had to shed skin, let go of my pre-maternal ways of being in order to accommodate fresh contingencies. As my child is learning to support his head and move his fingers to grasp things and to follow the trail of moving objects with his eyes, I am learning to adapt, to retain elements of my former life even as I mourn its loss occasionally while also moving on and inhabiting a dual consciousness. Motherhood marks you. There's really no way to return to anything prior.

Deliberating on the life and times of Everywoman, Rosalyn D'Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx
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